Yoda Birthday Cake – “May the Fondant Be With You”
My youngest recently turned four, and requested a Star Wars themed party, and…you guessed it - a ‘Yoda Cake’. As I am a male, and have been watching just enough “Ace of Cakes” recently to qualify as an expert in structural cake engineering, my natural response was to throw reason and restraint to the wind and set a course for building a life size Yoda cake. You heard me, “life-size”. Who’s the MAN now?
Oh and did I mention that I decided it had to be 100% edible?
…what a dumb-ass.
So now what? Well if you can’t innovate, you do as all of the before you…you copy. I went online and found instructions from other Yoda and R2-D2 cakes that more logical people had built in the past. Like the rational people that they were, they decided to build their cakes with two levels of cake. As you can see from the pictures here, mine would need FIVE.
With the cakes baked, the remaining portions of Yoda (head, arms and ears) were constructed out of Rice Krispy treats. Seven batches of Rice Krispy treats…
The cakes were baked in angel food cake pans and frozen until they could be stacked on top of each other and held together with chocolate frosting. With the cakes together it was time to make a more Yoda-like shape. I took a bread knife and used it to sculpt Yoda’s body (see below).
Once I got it to resemble (more or less) the shape of the body, I covered it with butter cream frosting and started to apply the fondant.
If you have never used fondant before (thanks to www.cakesbysam.com for the expedient shipping of my order of 15lbs of the stuff), here’s a little tip – don’t. Or at least don’t try to use it in a kitchen where your wife is cooking two baked ziti’s and heating the kitchen so that the stuff becomes a little too stretchy. And especially don’t take a break and sit it on a counter where the steam exhaust from the dishwasher will hit it for 20 minutes and make a 900 year old Jedi’s tunic look like a shiny polyester number from a John Travolta dance movie.
Anyway, after the tunic and head were coated, it was time to add the eyes, mouth nose and robe. I sculpted the head details based on some pictures online, and made the tunic by mixing the dark brown fondant with the white fondant to get the tan coloring of the robes right.
My new discovery out of all of this has been a substance called Petal Dust. Even though it sounds like something that should be sold in a back alley and snorted through a pixie stick, it is actually quite useful in adding detail to a cake covered in fondant. It looks and smells like mascara, but you paint it on with a paint brush. In this case I just painted it to highlight the wrinkles and other detail.
With the arms and the robe’s hood added, it was time to put it in the refrigerator for the night. The only problem was, between the pound cake layers and the 10 lbs of fondant used, it was 24” tall and weighed about 20 lbs. Good luck making space for that in the beer fridge in the garage.
Now I know I said 100% edible, but listen, Rice Krispy treats do not good ears make. They’re great when frozen, but a little droopy when they thaw. So at the last minute the edible ears were replaced with cardboard covered in fondant. Sorry.
Well needless to say. Twenty-six screaming toddlers and one very special four year old were quite pleased with the output. Not quite life size (I think 34” is life-size), but pretty close, and definitely a lot bigger than I thought when I see these pics.